It may be challenging work. It may be creative work. It may be skilled work. It may require multiple tries to get it right. You may have to learn new things. You may be rejected a bunch. You may get hung up on. You may not know how to get from A to B. You may have to persuade. You may have to deal with people you don’t like. You may have to sell something someone doesn’t know they want. You may have to be creative. You may have to build something that hasn’t been built before. You may have to battle entrenched interests. You may have to put in a few days or weeks in a row to figure something out you’re stuck on. You may have to make tradeoffs. But that’s the work. Not achieving the outcome you wanted doesn’t make it hard, it means you have more work to do.

The rhetoric of “We are the 99 percent” has in fact been dangerously self-serving, allowing people with healthy six-figure incomes to convince themselves that they are somehow in the same economic boat as ordinary Americans, and that it is just the so-called super rich who are to blame for inequality.“Rather than a poverty trap, there seems instead to be more stickiness at the other end: a ‘wealth trap,’ if you will.”

lunes, 26 de junio de 2017

Services businesses don’t scale because they are based on manpower: to double your revenue, you need to double the hours worked. Unless there is unused capacity, that means doubling the size of your team. And that’s just to achieve 2x growth. But in the tech world, scaling often means aiming for 10x or even 100x growth because the marginal cost for making extra copies of a digital product is insignificant.

VCs are looking for many multiples of growth to make a return on the multiple businesses they’ll invest in that fail. They’re not interested in slow but steady growth; they want boom, and they’ll risk bust (for the individual startup) to get it. (That’s just another reason why investor interest is not a good guide of the potential of your startup.)

So VCs won’t be interested if your startup doesn’t scale, and neither will the media and neither will the public. This is because the American dream isn’t a fantasy of steady, incremental growth—it’s a dream of celebrity, stardom, and riches.

If you’re prepared to put the dream on hold and take a cold look at your prospects, you’ll realize that there are significant advantages to creating a services business—one that doesn’t scale.

You’ll see money on day one, instead of working towards a future payday – which may never come.

You’ll learn about the cutting edge of what customers are demanding (and developing).

And this combination of revenue to play with and a sense of what is in demand can provide the perfect ingredients with which to subsequently create a successful scalable product business.

Jonathan Siegel is the founder of RightCart, RightSignature, and RightScale, the chairman and founder of Xenon Ventures, and the author of The San Francisco Fallacy.

domingo, 25 de junio de 2017

“A lot of companies don’t decide how they want to grow until they’re well into their growth phase,” she says. “For a long time, your actions pull your company along, and then all of a sudden it switches — your existing business starts pushing your behavior. External forces like feature requests, the need for more customer support, the need to create a team to do X when you never even needed to do X before — those forces start to dictate your decisions.”

The key, she says, is pausing just long enough to be very intentional about how you approach each phase of growth.

It’s easy to become too reactive, and when that happens, you’ll inevitably start to make human resources mistakes, execution mistakes, prioritization mistakes.

1. Have we documented our operating principles?

Stripe calls them “Operating Principles.” (Many companies have “values,” but Stripe wanted to distinguish philosophical beliefs from the concrete principles that should be applied to the day-to-day work of running the business.) Three of Stripe’s operating principles, as Johnson describes them, are:

Users first: “We always start with what our users need or would like, and then consider things like like infrastructure, internal constraints, partnerships, product roadmap, and so on."

Think rigorously: “We care about getting things right and it often takes reasoning from first principles to get there. We work hard to detect the errors in received wisdom. Rigor doesn’t mean not-invented-here syndrome; we’re interested in the world around us and think that other companies, industries, and academic fields have a lot to teach us. But in many cases progress comes from taking paths less traveled.”

Trust and amplify: “We want to work in a company of deeply good people who treat their colleagues exceptionally well. People should be committed to amplifying one another: to going out of their way to help each other in both the short- and long-term.”

sábado, 3 de junio de 2017

Deep tech accounted for $1.3 billion of European venture investments in 2015, delivered in 82 rounds, up from $289 million, delivered in 55 rounds, in 2011.

Europe’s traditional industries are now awakening to tech. Two-thirds of Europe’s largest corporates by market capitalization have made a direct investment in a tech company. One-third of those companies have acquired a tech company since the beginning of 2015.

image by stack overflow

…many small export-oriented European Union member countries – namely, the Benelux, Baltic, and Nordic countries – rank well above the US in so-called “e-intensity,” which covers IT infrastructure, Internet access, as well as businesses, consumer, and government engagement in Internet-related activities.

These “digital frontrunners” generate about 8% of their GDP from the Internet, compared to 5% in Europe’s Big Five (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom).

Weaknesses

•while European tech entrepreneurs find it as easy as their American counterparts to raise startup funds, US firms enjoy 14 times more later-stage capital. That funding gap would disappear, if European pension funds allocated just 0.6% more of their capital under management to venture investments.

•lack of a true European single digital market. In the US or China, tech entrepreneurs gain immediate access to a massive market. In Europe, they still must navigate 28 different consumer markets and regulatory regimes. …Europe’s “single digital market,” they argue, currently amounts “to a jumble of outdated, corporatist, counterproductive industrial policies that favor producers over consumers, big companies over small, traditional incumbents over digital startups, and EU firms over foreign ones.”

A new appetite for risk seems to be sweeping the continent; Atomico reports that more than 85% of founders say it is “culturally acceptable” to start one’s own company. Add to that deep research talent – five of the top ten global computer science faculties are within the EU – and Europe’s start-up boom looks sustainable.

Europe’s digital frontrunners are beginning to organize into a potent force, with 16 small EU countries, from Denmark to Ireland and Estonia, having formed a pro-Internet group. Together, these countries have urged the EU to ban data-localization requirements.

@daphnipolis uses to send a weekly newsletter, always interesting but with an editorial I think they do not publish in the internet… so I will, as it is a very good article, interesting as it backs the (not so) new trend accelerators are promoting, some of then even changing their current business model… by Paul Bazin.

Bold emphasis is mostly mine.

Our curse in Europe is that despite all our efforts we are not as sexy as the US with their big champions. That’s understandable: They have built worldwide tech giants since the 80s. Of course, we have our own champions, the “Criteos“ and “Spotifys“, but they don’t have the same visibility across the world to date.

If you like to look at the bright side of things, you can mention that foreigners are very often surprised by the quality and the energy of the ecosystem. That is exactly what happens to Paul Graham. We might have an undervalued asset to showcase our know-how: France's multinational corporations represent 8% of the biggest companies in the world. And guess what: As they are well-known throughout the world, they could be really good ambassadors.

But to do so they should be real actors of the tech ecosystem, you say? That’s right! They should be and they need to be.

We often consider that startups and big corporation are the David and Goliath of an economic battle. Big corporations are seen as the old generation. The expert one, where you needed to be the biggest know-how in a specific field to work your way up. Startups are at the opposite. In order to have a new look you need to think different, thus you need to have a global and broad knowledge.Brian Chesky never worked in the hospitality domain before disrupting it with Airbnb. Startups bring this fresh and new look that big corporations desperately need. Meanwhile, to share this vision, startups need money, visibility, worldwide networks, facilities, the list goes on…

There are two types of startups that interests MNCs:• The competitive: The ones that are attacking big corporations head on by capturing market share. Those provide the new vision.

•The mutualistic: The ones that are offering tools and technology to reinvent themselves. Startups can benefit from big companies by using them as a distribution channel (think what Apple did to the mobile industry) or clients (think of many B2B SaaS companies), big enterprises are using startups to reinvent themselves by making better use of their data, being more efficient, more customer centric, the list goes on... Those escort MNCs in their digital transformation.

Startups and big corporates should be viewed in a co-evolution process. The morphology and behaviour of the one is impacting the other.

Bottom line: Goliath needs David and David needs Goliath.Big corporations should provide visibility, know-how, money in exchange of a fresh vision, and tools for their digital transformation.

This way of seeing the relationship implies a big mentality shift: MNCs must be seen as a leverage opportunity to scale, and not as the enemy anymore. Having international players close to us is a chance for the ecosystem to grow.